Should kids get a trophy just for playing

[Kirby]

As a kid I played baseball, basketball, soccer, and swam, and I only earned trophies or ribbons for finishing 1st, 2nd or 3rd. The one exception were two swim meets each season where you earned a ribbon for every place you finished. Man, there is nothing sweeter than an 8th place ribbon! The 4th - 8th place ribbons found themselves in the trash pretty quick, even at a little kid, I knew those were bullshit.

I put in a lot of time and effort in sports as a kid and I only earned three trophies, One for 1st place in baseball, 2nd place in baseball, and 2nd place in soccer. All of those seasons where I played and lost, makes me appreciate those three trophies all that much more, and they're still on my parent's mantle.

My son gets these participation trophies. I figure that it'll water down the true joy of sacrafice and winning, or in 20 years he may get really upset that everyone didn't win employee of the month or something.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

In high school and college sports (and sometimes in junior high), you are rewarded with a letter to be worn on a letterman's jacket for meeting basic participation requirements. Some schools require you to meet certain performance standards as well, but usually it's just enough to be on the team for a majority of the season. You can earn further individual awards over and above that as well.

"Participation," "most improved," and "fewest practices missed" awards and others of that nature aren't unusual at the high school level either. You get a ring, trophy, or championship patch for the team winning even if you barely or never played, because it's a team effort, and even if you didn't personally win the big game you were there at practice helping the first string players improve their gameplay.

So I don't see why we put more emphasis on the dog eat dog world of competition with young children than we do with teens and adults in far more competitive levels of athletics. The whole point of sports for kids is for them to have fun, learn sportsmanship and teamwork, and stay active, not to teach them an object lesson about how the world is frequently a harsh place. Somehow I think they'll do just fine getting that message at every level of their lives for the next seventy years without their own parents and mentors shoving it down their throats at every opportunity as well.

People who are doing it for that reason are probably the same idiots who take kid's sports way too seriously and start yelling at umps or picking fights with other parents to make up for the failed athletic pursuits of their own youth.

There's nothing wrong with better awards for winning or various levels of achievement over and above just sticking with it, but some award or memento for participation should also be given for children's sports.

 

[Trekker4747]

People who are doing it for that reason are probably the same idiots who take kid's sports way too seriously and start yelling at umps or picking fights with other parents to make up for the failed athletic pursuits of their own youth.

This.


Trekker, lettered in drama.

 

[the 4th hanson bro]

Personally, I think there should be only one trophy, and it should be based on objective, rather than relative, criteria; in other words, there should always be the possibility of nobody getting an award.

It sounds like you want to set the bar so high in terms of performance that there's a chance nobody reaches it. What message does that send? Work your ass off, try hard, play well but because the standard was so high, nobody actually gets rewarded. That doesn't make sense.

That way, the maximum number of children will be discouraged from participating in sports and competition

Why discourage kids from this? There's a lot to be learned from competition. Teamwork, preparation, different people have different roles, dealing with success, dealing with failure, sportsmanship, learning new skills, discipline, making new friends, and crushing your opponent into the dust with your heel as you run by them.

Maybe the last one's an exaggeration, but there's a lot to learn/ be gained from participating in sports - either team or individual.

To actively discourage kids from doing this is a mistake and will only lead to ever increasingly self centered people with unrealistic expectations of the world. If nobody ever wins or people only win so rarely that it's an event, why try?

and will then hopefully get involved in writing or art or music or something.

You do realize that sports and the arts aren't mutually exclusive? It's not an either or question. Writing, art, and music can be defined as solitary pursuits. They can help a kid be more creative along with self discipline and learning, but they miss out on the whole interacting with others bit for the most part. If a kid joins a band the other people come into play.

Kid's sports would be better if the parents weren't allowed to watch.

Playing youth soccer, we got a patch every season we played. The division winners got a patch that said "division champions" and a trophy. It was neat to accumulate the patches for the jacket, but the champion patches were what mattered.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I was mostly kidding, but I would rather see more kids get involved in the Arts over Sports. I don't think many of the lessons learned in Sports are all that positive. When my Nephew was younger, he loved to read and watch science and animal shows and had no interest in Sports; everybody pressured him to join this or that team and finally he gave in and after complaining about it for a while learned to like it; now he doesn't read as much, stopped watching documentaries and bullies girls.

 

[Pingfah]

^ I think sport for kids should be more about getting fit and being healthy than learning life lessons. It is extremely important for kids to exercise and to understand the importance of it as they head into adult life. Being creative isn't much good if you're heading for a heart attack at 30.

Although competitive sports are far from the only way to get kids fit.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Exactly. And I think there are a lot of negatives in the "Sports culture."

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I was mostly kidding, but I would rather see more kids get involved in the Arts over Sports. I don't think many of the lessons learned in Sports are all that positive. When my Nephew was younger, he loved to read and watch science and animal shows and had no interest in Sports; everybody pressured him to join this or that team and finally he gave in and after complaining about it for a while learned to like it; now he doesn't read as much, stopped watching documentaries and bullies girls.

Well, if we want to play the anecdotal blame game, maybe he saw a stage revival of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and identified with Stanley Kowalski a bit too much. The arts are clearly poisoning America's youth based on this one example where we don't even know what caused the change in his personality! Because people never change on their own as they grow older or anything.

C'mon RJ, you're better than that. It's fine if you'd rather have kids focus on the arts over athletics (I see nothing wrong with doing either or both), but that comment was - to borrow a sport's metaphor - Busch League. I doubt you would approve of people blaming video games or violent/sexual movies and TV shows for the bad behavior of teens and young adults, so it shouldn't fly here either.

 

[RJDiogenes]

True, but it's not an isolated incident. Basically, I'm seeing exactly what I saw many times when I was a kid. The idea is supposed to be that Sports teaches competition and sportsmanship, but more often it seems to teach aggression and hostility.

 

[Miss Chicken]

It might be because I went to an all-girls high school but i don't remember our sports being very aggressive or hostile.

 

[RoJoHen]

True, but it's not an isolated incident. Basically, I'm seeing exactly what I saw many times when I was a kid. The idea is supposed to be that Sports teaches competition and sportsmanship, but more often it seems to teach aggression and hostility.

In that case, there's something wrong with the people teaching it, but I don't think sports should be discouraged just because some coaches are douchebags.

 

[May 20]

Maybe you're placing the blame on the wrong thing. Sports don't teach aggression and hostility unless there's a climate for it. I do agree that children's sports would be a better place for kids if parents weren't allowed to be active participants. Let the kids learn the rules of the game and learn to enjoy the game (sportsmanship) before amping up the competition, which isn't a bad thing unless it's allowed to become the only thing.

I've seen other forms of competition get nasty, too. Should we discourage children from music because someone's instrument was sabotaged or a band's music was 'misplaced' before a competition performance? Should we discourage children from dance because shoes or costumes were ruined? Of course not.

I consider myself a pro-active parent. I will talk to the coach at the beginning of the season, not so much to promote my children but to get a feel for how the coach deals with kids, what his or her goals are for the team. With my son, we're still in the "let's learn the rules and have fun" stage of sports, so it's not as critical as I know it will be later on. Being a competitive good sport, one who challenges himself and his teammates to improve as players, a good team player who is one who can be a positive player regardless of ability or the score matters more to me for my children than all the trophies in the world.

 

[RJDiogenes]

As I said, I was mostly kidding or exaggerating; I don't think Sports are intrinsically negative. It's just this culture that seems to grow around them.

 

[Bloodwhiner]

^^^

I understand where your coming from. Youth sports got screwed up when adults got involved and started organizing, making rules and setting up committees.

Now kids are afraid to grab a ball and go to an open field for fun.